The answer is clearly YES. 

The automotive industry has known for many, many years that air bag deployment can cause breathing problems, and that those problems can be especially severe when a person has pre-existing respiratory conditions.  Here’s why:

Air bag deployment is often based on the burning of chemicals.  The most widely used chemical is sodium azide.  When it burns, it generates not only nitrogen gas that fills the airbag, but also numerous by-products.  In this way, it is similar to the burning of gas in your engine creating numerous by-products that come out of your exhaust system.  Although other airbag inflators may use stored gas, they also have a “heating element”, which means another chemical that is burned to heat and expand the gas that inflates the airbag.  Because no combustion is 100% pure, there are always by-products produced by all of these inflators.

The by-products fall within two broad categories: gases and particulates.  Gases that are produced can include those that have been linked to severe injuries, such as benzene and toluene.  Particulates are small particles that are suspended in the air, which appear as smoke or dust.  They are the reason that many people report seeing smoke in their car after an airbag deploys.  This is because all airbags have venting, either through the porous fabric or through vent holes, that allow the smoke to escape from the airbag, as seen in this photo:

Collectively, gases and particulates from an air bag are called “effluent”, which simply means they flow out from the air bag during deployment.

The concerns over the harm that could be caused by these airbag chemicals led the Society of Automotive Engineers to create a standard for measuring these by-products.  That standard lists numerous chemicals that should be measured by the manufacturers to determine the risk of injury posed by their inflators.

More than a decade ago, General Motors conducted tests to evaluate the effects of these chemicals on people exposed to air bag deployment.  I know, since I personally saw such testing.  I provided a car for the testing, as well as many air bag modules, and the testing was conducted by scientists at the General Motors Research Laboratories.  The results were astounding.

Volunteers were used for such testing.  They sat in the back seat of the car, with medical professionals supervising the testing.  There were also numerous instruments in the vehicle to measure the amount of gases and particulates, as well as their types and sizes.  The intent was to have the volunteer stay in the car, with the windows up, for 20 minutes following deployment.  During that period of time, the volunteers’ physiological signs were monitored, including their breathing rate.  In at least one case, the volunteer could not stand it, and needed to get out of the car almost right away.  His measurements showed significant distress!

That testing also showed that the most vulnerable people were those who had other, pre-existing conditions affecting their ability to breathe.  For example, people with asthma were at risk.  The more severe the asthma, the higher the risk from air bag deployment.  Several people have reported very significant respiratory injuries from airbag deployment; we have even heard of one death attributed to air bag deployment.  The worst injuries occur if a person cannot exit the vehicle right away (for example, if they are knocked out, or if the doors won’t open after the accident), and the windows are closed.

That same testing program also evaluated the effect of air bag deployment on a person’s hearing.  That will be the subject of a separate post.

In this condition, the expansion force of the gas may be insufficient to properly inflate the air bag when the SRS system is activated during a crash. This may increase the risk of injury to the occupant in the involved seating position in the event of a crash. Dealers will replace the specific SRS air bag. The recall began on April 6, 2006. 06V-096.

This is yet another recall that indicates that Toyota’s quality control measures were inadequate for such a critical safety component.  Simply put, safety related parts like air bag should never be shipped from the manufacturing facility if they do not meet specifications.  That is the whole purpose of a quality control program: to ensure defective parts never make it to the consumer.  Obviously, the quality control system failed, unnecessarily exposing Toyota customers to the risk of serious injury or death.

This is because some inflators were improperly manufactured with two secondary inflator filter discs, rather than just the one that was specified.  Using two discs can cause the pressure to back up as a result of gas flow blockage.  During a passenger-side air bag deployment, pieces of the inflator tube could strike and injure vehicle occupants and the air bag cushion would not inflate fully, reducing the capability of the bag to protect the passenger. The recall is expected to begin during mid-October 2008. 08V-517.

This defect was discovered during quality control (lot acceptance) testing at the supplier’s plant.  This recall proves that GM’s and the supplier’s quality control procedures were not working properly.  The defective parts should never have been shipped from the supplier’s facility until after all the quality control tests had been passed.  Instead, it seems that the supplier decided to ship the parts to GM for installation on cars before it had confirmed the tests were passed.  This unnecessarily puts GM’s customers at risk for this safety defect.

I used independent experts to test the Camry passenger air bag. That testing documented that the air bag generally deployed at speeds approaching 250 mph. However, quality control issues could raise the deployment speed to over 400 mph! These speeds are well over the industry standard for limiting the risk of eye injuries from deploying air bags.

Toyota Camry Airbag Hitting Passenger Face

According to the data from the black box (Restraints Control Module), the driver seat belt was buckled, but there was a fault within the driver seat belt pretensioner at the time of the collision. Our investigation also revealed a concern regarding whether the air bag should have deployed at all.  Furthermore, the evidence indicated that the driver air bag deployed at a higher force level than it should have, and that the actual deployment time was later than it should have been.

Crash test dummies representing a 95th percentile adult male have been available for crash testing for more than 20 years. Injury criteria for this crash test dummy were developed by the industry decades ago. Unfortunately, our experience in air bag lawsuits has revealed that some car companies failed to conduct any crash testing with these crash test dummies. Some have claimed that they could not conduct such testing because the government did not incorporate the injury criteria into federal regulations at that time. This argument is completely unpersuasive.

First, the federal regulations are minimum standards, and do not represent the state-of-the-art. A manufacturer has always been free to exceed those standards, and could therefore have conducted such testing. Second, the injury criteria were published within the automotive industry, and the car companies could have utilized those published criteria to evaluate the risk of injury to large stature occupants. Third, if a particular car company disagreed with the published injury criteria, it could have developed its own standards. It is telling that those companies who claim that the injury criteria were not “validated” are the ones who never even tried to evaluate or validate them. Fourth, significant information about crash test dummy kinematics (the motion of the crash test dummy during a crash) could be obtained even if the injury measurements were not made.

In my opinion, the car companies who try to justify their failure to use these large size crash test dummies are merely engaging in a junk science post-hoc rationalization of their failure to comply with industry standards.

Those car companies who failed to conduct appropriate testing with a reasonably foreseeable range of occupant sizes were negligent and reckless. In my opinion, this failure to test was often the result of putting profits ahead of safety. It costs money to conduct this testing. A prototype of an all-new vehicle line can cost as much as $500,000, with the actual test cost adding to the total; this provides an incentive for car companies to skip such testing. If the testing reveals a problem (such as contact of the occupant’s forehead with the windshield header, or a risk of neck injury), it can cost many millions of dollars to fix the problem. Those companies who fail to conduct appropriate testing create an unfair advantage by saving millions of dollars compared to those who do the right thing and conduct all appropriate testing to ensure their air bag systems work appropriately.

If you believe a car company cut corners in designing your air bag system and caused you to be injured in an accident, please feel free to call us toll-free at 1-888-834-5297 for a n0-charge consultation with an air bag lawyer and former air bag engineer / expert witness.

The Society of Automotive Engineers has published an industry standard specifically requiring that cars be designed with this in mind. Crash test dummies representing a 5th percentile adult female have been available for crash testing for more than 20 years. Injury criteria for this crash test dummy were developed by the industry decades ago. Despite this, our research has discovered that some car companies failed to conduct any crash testing with these crash test dummies. Some have claimed that they could not conduct such testing because the government did not incorporate the injury criteria into federal regulations at that time. This argument is completely unpersuasive.

First, the federal regulations are minimum standards, and do not represent the state-of-the-art. A manufacturer has always been free to exceed those standards, and could therefore have conducted such testing. Second, the injury criteria were published within the automotive industry, and the car companies could have utilized those published criteria to evaluate the risk of injury to small stature occupants. Third, if a particular car company disagreed with the published injury criteria, it could have developed its own standards. It is telling that those companies who claim that the injury criteria were not “validated” are the ones who never even tried to evaluate or validate them. Fourth, significant information about crash test dummy kinematics (the motion of the crash test dummy during a crash) could be obtained even if the injury measurements were not made. Fifth, it is well known in the industry that small stature females are at greater risk of air bag inflation-induced injuries. Therefore, it is critical to conduct such testing to make sure the air bag is appropriately designed. In my opinion, the car companies who try to justify their failure to use these small size crash test dummies are merely engaging in a junk science post-hoc rationalization of their failure to comply with industry standards.

Those car companies who failed to conduct appropriate testing with a reasonably foreseeable range of occupant sizes were negligent and reckless. In my opinion, this failure to test was often the result of putting profits ahead of safety. It costs money to conduct this testing. A prototype of an all-new vehicle line can cost as much as $500,000, with the actual test cost adding to the total; this provides an incentive for car companies to skip such testing. If the testing reveals a problem (such as the risk of head, neck or chest injury), it can cost many millions of dollars to fix the problem.
Those companies who fail to conduct appropriate testing create an unfair advantage by saving millions of dollars compared to those who do the right thing and conduct all appropriate testing to ensure their air bag systems work appropriately. We as a society should never reward those companies that put profits ahead of safety.  The law allows consumers to hold those car companies accountable for their defects and for their negligence or recklessness in designing and testing air bags.

The deeper we dug into the Ford Focus airbag design and development process, the more problems we found.  For example, even though Ford told the government that most of its airbags are designed not to deploy below 8 mph in barrier crash tests, the 2000 and 2001 Ford Focus were different: they can deploy even in certain accidents at 6 and 1/2 mph.  This is lower than virtually all other Ford airbag systems from the prior decade.  Incredibly, Ford admitted that it didn’t even know the actual air bag non-deployment threshold when it started selling these cars to its customers!  They later changed the airbag system design to increase the threshold beginning in 2002, but they never recalled the 2000 and 2001 Ford Focus cars to fix this problem.

Additionally, the driver airbag itself lacked internal “tethers”.  Tethers are straps inside the airbag that prevent it from deploying as far toward the driver.  This reduces the risk of injury from the deploying airbag.  In this Ford Focus, however, Ford decided to instead use sewing thread to stitch together parts of the airbag, as a substitute for the tether straps.  Simply put, such stitching is certainly cheaper than tethers, but it doesn’t work nearly as well in reducing airbag injuries.  They certainly didn’t prevent our client from being blinded in one eye.

I think everyone would agree that any reasonable company should always put safety ahead of profits.

The IIHS then retested those two trucks with their optional side airbags.  Incredibly, the crash protection for the Nissan Titan was rated only “Marginal” in that crash test.  Even more incredibly, the Chevrolet Silverado pickup still continued to receive the lowest possible rating of “Poor”, even when tested with the optional side air bag.

According to the IIHS spokesperson, this result was due in part to the design of the Silverado’s side airbag system.  It used a side curtain airbag to reduce the risk of injury to the head.  However, it failed to include a torso airbag for side impacts, leaving the consumer’s upper body more vulnerable to the crash forces.  The IIHS noted that the inadequate side structure also contributed to the poor performance; this side structure is part of the safety cage that is supposed to protect a person during an accident.

This testing reinforces the fact that not all side air bag systems are created equal.  Different designs perform differently in crash testing, and in real-world accidents.  These differences in airbag designs, or defects in side airbags, could mean the difference between life and death for you or a loved one.